Sourdough Saturday - Ginger Cookies (Epic Fail)

Perhaps I was pushing my luck too far with my recent successes in sourdough baking. Perhaps it had to do with cooking while sick...who knows. So when Saturday rolled around I really didn't feel like baking, or doing much besides curling up and sleeping. We've all been sick lately, not enough to be bedridden or anything, just dragging around. So I amended my original planned baking to do something that would be easier. In my Alaska Sourdough cookbook by Ruth Allman there was a recipe for Soft Ginger Cookies. Since cookies are my specialty and I can bake them in my sleep, it seemed to be a no-brainer. I mixed up the dough, got it chilled in the refrigerator, GS and I rolled them out, cut them out, and put them in the oven to bake. As I was cleaning up the counters while the cookies were baking, I was reviewing in my mind the reaction between the sourdough starter and the baking soda which makes quickbreads rise, when I was struck by a strange thought - "I don't remember putting baking soda in the dough". I went back to the book and re-read and the baking soda was there at the bottom of the list. I had missed it! Too late now, the cookies were already baking. At the finish line they looked about the same as they did at the start, little dense circles of cookie dough, baked on the outside and like a lump in the middle. So alas, the cookies did not make it and I will have to try them again.

On that note, this is the first recipe I have tried from that book. It is an interesting book, it is in handwriting and not print. It has a lot of stories and history in it. The annoying thing was that the ingredients were not in the order that they were used in the recipe, which accounted for going back and forth, and I believe one of the reasons that I missed the soda. Still, I hope to try this recipe again on a better day and to try other recipes in the book.